KikScore gives small online businesses the ability to demonstrate to online shoppers that their business is trustworthy and reliable. The KikScore service takes publicly available information and other verified information about a business and assigns a Kikscore number to it. That number is displayed on the merchant’s website through a KikScore seal that is continually being updated, like a dynamic report card. You can see a sample Kikscore at the bottom right hand corner of the screenshot below.
Q&A with Rajeev Malik
Who are the founders of Kikscore?
Joel Springer, Mike Mauseth, and I are just part of the great team that makes up KikScore. The three of us (plus our extended management team) have previously launched other start-ups, as well as new product lines for existing businesses. KikScore, however, is the first new product we’ve launched solely on our own nickel — which is both exciting and stressful.
When did you launch Kikscore?
We launched late Q4 of 2009. Take a look at our initial blog posting announcing KikScore and our service.
Where are you based?
We have two locations, Washington D.C. and Denver, Colorado.
How would you describe your business?
We are at the intersection of reputation management and data transparency. We are passionate about entrepreneurs and small business. Our goal is to increase trust online by giving small businesses and online sellers a trust score that is based upon multiple data sources about a person or business. Then shoppers can use this trust score and the data provided, to make a better buying decision. Ultimately our company is about empowering small businesses to use information about themselves to help them build trust so they can sell more. With new and smaller businesses, their reputation and trustworthiness are a combination of both the business (its security, practices, policies) and the operator/owner (personal character, financial responsibility). KikScore combines both to give a shopper an objective and transparent view of the online business.
Here’s a link so you can see how it work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3YiL59pBCc
What inspired you to launch your product/service?
We are a bunch of night and weekend entrepreneurs (we have day jobs! – see post about it http://bit.ly/QD5ql) who kept hearing from friends, family and other people about how difficult it is to get information about small merchants and e-tailers that sell online.
On the flip side, we are married to small business owners and have other types of business folks in our circle of family and friends who have also said that it is difficult to build a brand and compete online against big retailers. That’s because those bigger brands are known entities that online shoppers will often decide to buy from, instead of the smaller business even when the latter are less expensive and have better service.
We said we can solve this issue. The Kikscore team comes from e-commerce and data analysis backgrounds. So we said let’s make it easy for the data (about small businesses and their management) that relates to trust, reliability and track record of delivering results, to be displayed to online shoppers. We scoured the different proprietary and public databases that contains information about these small businesses and we display that information to the public.
But we decided to take it even further by also analyzing and scoring the information based on various trust factors we are familiar with that reveal a low or high likelihood for fraud and lack of trustworthiness. It is akin to a credit score for small businesses, but it is a trust score. The trust score and the information transparency allow KikScore to create a dynamic business report card that online sellers can display to shoppers so these small businesses can demonstrate that they can be trusted.
How are you making money (or how will you make money in the future)?
We are in a free beta phase right now, but will start charging on a subscription basis soon. We also have product extensions that we will be launching this spring that will also bring a revenue string through a subscription model.
Where do you see your product/service within a year?
We are already seeing our beta customers telling us that their sales have increased after they added the KikScore seal! That makes us excited. We want to continue to build on that. In a year, we will: (a) continue to build our customer base; (b) increase the base of the new products we will be launching this spring and (c) provide data and trend analysis on a transactional basis from these small business websites. We are getting the word out through our blog at blog.kikscore.com, on Twitter at @kikscore and on the KikScore Facebook page.
Are you self-funded or do you have angel investors?
We are completely self funded.
5 February 2010 at 21:41
Thanks for the interview. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to cover KikScore.com. On behalf of the entire KikScore team, thanks so much to Pajama Entrepreneur.
6 February 2010 at 14:46
Great interview Pajama Entrepreneur and KikScore. Thanks Pajama for opening the doorway for small businesses through your thoughtful interviews and posts.
6 February 2010 at 16:49
Good interview, it is excellent. I am actually a KikScore customer. My site is 17thandriggs.com and the Kikscore seal has really helped my site/business build brand recognition and also allow visitors to my site to know more about my business. That has helped close the sale on some of my higher end pieces of furniture I sold where customers were thinking about going with someone else but saw the seal and found out more about me and the business and eventually bought from me. Its a good product and really happy to have it on my site. Nice to get some more background on the Kikscore team too. Thanks Pajama Entrepreneur. I am adding your blog to my RSS feed by the way. Like what you are doing.
6 February 2010 at 18:04
TRUST! What it mean? What does it signify in our daily lives? Toyota 2010 and the vehicle recall, J&J 2009 and the Tylenol recall. Who would you trust? How do we know when to trust a business, large or small? Reputations are built over tens of years, only to be destroyed or strengthened in minutes by actions of omission or commission as these two companies have shown. Trust subsequently grows or disappears. Rebuilding it is NEVER easy. For a small business or entrepreneur, having an independent entity to say you can be trusted is truly invaluable, as you do not have the dollars a Toyota or J&J has to help build it, or worse, undo any damage that comes with events that would lead to its loss. Enter KikScore! As I read about it, I am reminded of how our personal actions lead to a credit score, which enables a myriad of entities to trust our word without ever interacting with us in person. We either receive or are denied from the simple store credit card to a mortgage when we most need them. That is exactly where I see KikScore taking small businesses – as the signal to your customers, and hopefully lenders and other businesses, that you can be TRUSTED. They will choose whether or not to interact with you, determining whether you grow as a business, or struggle!
19 February 2010 at 07:10
Great interview, and great service by Kikscore. Small business is going to continue to be the engine of our economy, and with so many of them out there this service can help differentiate the good ones from the bad ones. More importantly – it adds transparency to the customer beyond whether or not the website has security protocols (which is what the competitors do), and it allows the customer to make a decision based on the facts. Great idea!